Monitoring and Assisting Maternity-Infant Care in Rural Areas (MAMICare)

Abstract

Presented is the project called MAMICare, which is motivated by the alarming number of maternity and infant deaths in rural areas due mainly to a poor monitoring of pregnancy progress and lack of appropriate alerting mechanism in case of abnormal gestation evolution. This work proposes an information technology solution based on mobile devices, and health sensors such as ECG (electrocardiogram), stethoscope, pulse-oximeter, and blood-glucose meter to collect automatically relevant health data for a better monitoring of pregnant women. This article addresses the status of the maternity infant death problem especially in rural areas of Mexico. It reviews some applications of IT in health systems (known also as Electronic Health or simply e-Health) and discusses how these are related to the presented proposal and how they differ. The article presents the proposed solution and discuss the current status of the work.